08/02/2021
By Karen Mullins
Committee:
James Forest, Chair
Arie Perliger
Jason Rydberg
Neil Shortland
ABSTRACT
The robust field of research on risk factors for radicalization to terrorism suffers from a nagging question: with so many risk factors, why so few terrorists? This dissertation contends that a better understanding of why the few engage in violent activity requires scrutiny of why most do not. A theoretical framework derived from Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control (AGT) considers the constraining influence of socio-structural and personal demographic variables experienced across the life course on engagement in nonviolent versus violent political extremism. Data were gleaned from the Profiles of Individuals Radicalized in the United States (PIRUS) data set. The data contain 147 variables for 2,148 United States-based political extremists identified in publicly available sources between 1947 and 2018. Multiple imputation by chained equations in RStudio was used to impute the missing values. The Stepwise model provided the best fit to the data and the Theoretical model was specified according to the propositions of AGT. Each included models representing the juvenile, adult, and life course stages. The restricted juvenile and adult models were combined and nested in the complete life course model. Binomial logistic regression analyses with the pooled results of 100 multiply imputed data sets were used to analyze the Stepwise and Theoretical models. Changes across the life course and between models were assessed via paired t tests. Social stratum as a child, strong work history, combat military experience, and an interaction of being married with children significantly decreased the odds of engaging in terrorism versus nonviolent political extremism. Contributions include the constraining effect of social stratum as a child on engagement in terrorism as an adult, disaggregation of the military veteran by combat experience, and identification of the interaction between marital status and parenthood.